Sweet Organization in a Pretty Package

Today's project was the long-overdue construction of a new drawer to go in this spot in our entertainment center. Pictured below is what is hidden behind the drawer and you can sort of see that the addition of an xbox one (at Christmas) has overloaded our current space. Kind of makes it look like the game drawer threw up all over the place. It makes me a little nuts when things don't have a place to be put away.

So the things I had to keep in mind were that the drawer couldn't fill the enter opening in the cabinet, because we needed the room for the power strip and cords at the back. Pictured below is the drawer that had bee in that spot. It was just deep enough to fit DVD's and clearly was sucking at that too, as we had acquired more of them, and that meant that the new ones were just hap-hazardly stacked on top of the ones nestled in the drawer. We also weren't taking full advantage of the available space. I think when I built that drawer I wasn't sure how much room we would need for the cords, and so I was a bit too generous in allowing tons of extra room at the back of the cabinet. Time to take back the space.

Next step was to draw up my plans. I don't always do this. Sometimes I just wing it and guess as I go along. When I wing it, I usually regret it, and end up with lots of fancy firewood. So take the time and draw up your design. I know I have 27 3/4-inches wide, 9 1/2 inches tall and 17 inches deep to work with (took those measurements directly from the cabinet. Since I still need to leave some room for the cables in the back, the drawer can be no deeper than 12 1/2 inches (leaving 4 1/2 inches for cords/cables). To find the width of the drawer, this will be dependent upon the kind of drawer slide you pick up. I used some that look like this (cheap-o standard drawer slide). We don't need anything fancy for this project, and these are readily available at Home Depot and Lowe's. Those place also have some drawer slides that have ball-bearings and claim to be self-closing (they look like this). Those things are total junk, and I would avoid the hassle. They're harder to install, and I suppose when they say "self"-closing they mean I will close them myself... because they don't do jack. If you want really nice drawer slides that are self-closing and top of the line go for the Blum Blumotion kind (they look like this) and are absolutely amazing (and concealed on the bottom of the drawer). I installed those in my kitchen... but I'm digressing. The reason you need to know what you're using for drawer slides, is because the width of your drawer will be a little different depending upon what slide you choose. The cheap ones I picked up and the crap self-closing ones both need about 1/2 inch clearance on either side of the drawer, whereas the sweet-ass Blum variety will need 3/8-inch. So you'll see in my drawing, I made the width of the bottom drawer (the bigger drawer) 1 inch narrower than the opening (1/2 inch on the left + 1/2 inch on the right = 1 inch). For the depth of the drawer measurement, you want the total depth and then subtract from that 3/8 inch at the front and back (3/8 + 3/8 = 3/4). You're going to have overlap between the front and back drawers and the sides when we go to make the dovetails, which will eat up all but 3/8 inch on the depth on the front and the same on the back - so subtracting this from the total depth of your desired drawer will tell you how long to make the sides.

If you're only doing a simple drawer, then you don't need to know the rest of this. But I cannot seem to do anything in a simple way... so naturally I decided I wanted a smaller drawer that nestled inside and extended above the bottom drawer. This way I could have storage for the DVD's below, and storage for whatever I wanted above that. You may find this super handy if you have really deep drawers in other places, because a lot of that depth becomes wasted space. The first step for making this work, was to be sure to allow for room for the DVD's to fit, so the depth of the drawer had to allow for at least 5 1/2 inches before running into the top drawer. I had 7 inches of height to work with, 1/4 inch will be lost on the bottom for the drawer bottom, this means I could eat up 1 1/4 inches at the top of the drawer where the smaller drawer would fit into it. So I cut the back piece 1 1/4 inches shorter than that front. This allows the smaller drawer to slide backwards out of the bottom drawer.

To make the pieces for the upper drawer, I took the width of the bottom drawer, subtracted 1/2 inch + 1/2 inch (this is the thickness of my wood) to tell me what the inside measurements of the bottom drawer were. Then I subtracted another 1 inch to allow for the drawer slides that would go with this drawer.

With my design in mind, I went out and cut my wood.

I cut the basic pieces I needed and then laid them out on the floor (this will be essential when we get to making the dovetails. So what you're looking at are the two separate drawers, laid out so that we are seeing the inside face of each piece.

Next step is to cut the rabbet in the bottom edge of each piece. My base is 1/4 inch thick. I could pull out my rabbet/dado blade set that makes quick work of cutting this groove. These blades have 2 cutting blades and then you sandwich chipping blades and spacers in between them based upon how wide the dado or rabbet needs to be. For such a narrow cut, I just make one pass with my regular blade (which knocks off 1/8 inch) and then move the blade over and make another pass to get to 1/4 inch.

I don't like using the rabbet cut, as explained below. It's not a very strong way to attach the bottom to the drawer, and whenever I make something that two boys will be "testing" I want it as strong as possible. But I have a finite amount of space to work with, so I didn't have extra room to do a dado.

So with your rabbet or dado cut, now we can move on to making the dovetails. For this project I choose to do half-blind dovetails. That just means that from the front of the drawer you don't see anything aside from a plain piece of wood, but from the side you see the dovetails. Since I'm going to be attaching a drawer face to this, it doesn't matter if the dovetails go all the way through to the front (for aesthetic reasons) and the drawer is just as strong as this way.

You will need a router and fluted bit (as opposed to a straight bit). The fluted bit will make it's cut at a slight diagonal angle. A straight bit would be used for dovetails that go all the way through and the bit appears, rightly so, straight when you look at it from the side. I like the Porter Cable router. It has tons of power and is adaptable to different types of bits - which is more than I can say for the Ryobi one I had kicking around before that. I'm not saying that Ryobi is a poor tool... it's more of a starter tool and it just wouldn't work for this project, thus showing how inadequate it is at adapting to your needs. It's one that I don't mind dropping or leaving out in the rain. ;)

Porter Cable is also the company that makes the dovetail jig that I picked up. Thought I had taken a picture of it but I guess not. Here's one I found online. It has 2 separate jigs (depending upon what model you have). The bottom one is more making through cuts... so I didn't use that one for the half-blind dovetails.

Now comes the time to make the cuts. The whole reason I had you lay out your wood looking the way it would ultimately go together, is to make it easier to make these cuts. Your pieces will be put together with the inside edge facing up (on the front or back piece) and facing out (on the side pieces). So in the picture below the piece that is perpendicular is the side, and the piece that is meeting it (which is placed in the jig horizontally) is the back. Then you just fire up the router, slide it along the jig and it makes these fancy finger-like cuts.

If you are using plywood, like I am, you're going to run into some trouble with the wood tearing a bit. It's unavoidable. The best dovetails I've made were not done using this type of wood. The reason we run into this so much with the plywood is because it's an elaborate sandwich of layers of wood, with a nice veneer piece on the outside edges. With regular wood, it's solid and doesn't react to how we are operating the router, whereas the plywood's veneer sheet is super thin and very delicate. You can see in the top image that the face of the wood still looks nice, as compared the image below where the veneer is ripped to shreds.

To minimize the amount of tearing, I tried a couple different techniques when cutting and found this to be the most effective, though not perfect. So pictured below is the motion I used with the router. So we want the force of the router to tear with the force pushing the nice veneer towards the rest of the plywood. In the motion on the left, we first cut by moving the router towards the end of the pin, and then slide down the edge of the jig, and finish by pulling out the same when you slide in. You would then slide down the other edge of the pin, again starting at the end. In the example to the left, the cut was made by plunging deep into the jig first and then sliding out the edge of the jig. This puts too much pressure on the veneer and causes it to tear out. Super confusing to try to describe, but definitely worth doing a couple test pieces first to get a feel for what works best.

With all your pieces cut, you can now put a small dab of glue in the grooves cut in the front or back piece.

Then align the side piece, and using a mallet gently pound the two together. After cutting them with the jig it will seem odd that they could go together like this, but it really works beautifully.

Finally you're going to attach the bottom pieces. If you used a dado cut (groove) then you would want to slide the bottom into place before pounding on the last side piece. For mine I could attach it last since it was going on the very bottom. Note - the measurements I wrote for the cutting the bottom pieces were guesses. I usually will wait until I have the drawer partially assembled to take these measurements so I can be sure it's a perfect fit. Mine also required a couple small nails and glue to hold in place (whereas the dado cut wouldn't need this). The nails are more to hold the bottom in place while the glue dries.

Now you can stain or paint your drawer. I think it would be kind of silly to make such pretty drawer (dovetails and all) and then cover them with paint), but you can do whatever you wish. I like this Minwax Polycrylic because it dries super fast and I can clean the brush with soap and water.

The final step is assembly. I attached the drawer slides to the entertainment center and then to the bottom of the bottom drawer and tested the fit. Then I did the same, attaching the drawer slides to the bottom of the smaller drawer, and the pieces that would normally go inside the cabinet were attached to the inside edge of the bottom drawer.

One important thing to pay attention to here, is that for the upper drawer, the drawer slides will be installed backwards. Think about it this way, your bottom drawer will pull out of the cabinet, so you attach the slides to make that happen. But the smaller drawer will be pulling out of the bottom drawer, moving back into the cabinet with this motion. So make sure you install the slides in the opposite direction, or else you'll be cursing yourself when you can't slide the small drawer into the bottom drawer.